It was late November and Zambia was still waiting for the rains. The air was hot, the earth a dried husk, the delicate, feathered heads of papyrus motionless under a dazzling blue sky. I’d just come from Zimbabwe and Botswana where wildlife was struggling from an extended drought. Elephant calves had perished from a lack of food and there was trouble brewing — elephants on crop raids, talk of culling quotas — all along the edges of the protected zones which made up the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or KAZA TFCA. This vast contiguous territory, larger than Germany and Austria combined, connects wildlife-rich territories in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

It was in pursuit of better news that I drove over the border into Zambia, following a tip-off from the Zimbabwe-based safari guide, Rob Janisch. He’d recently visited an 1,800 sq km community conservancy called Simalaha in the heart of the KAZA conservation mosaic, on the Zambian side of the Zambezi river. “Simalaha can help uncork the bottlenecks caused by elephant over-populations, opening up corridors for wildlife to migrate into Zambia’s Kafue and Sioma Ngwezi National Parks,” said Janisch. “Elephants will swim the river if they need to.”

He told me about a Zambian couple called Gail Kleinschmidt and Doug Evans who’d recently started horseriding safaris in Simalaha. They’d invested in four tented guest rooms on wooden stilts, and a herd of 25 riding horses, which was the only tourism operation inside the 400 sq km wildlife sanctuary at the conservancy’s heart. I thought their frontier approach alluring.